Victimhood culture explains what is happening at Emory

College students on many American campuses are showing an extraordinary mix of fragility and anger that is puzzling to outsiders. The recent events at Emory University are a dramatic case: some students described themselves as being afraid and “in pain” after seeing “Trump 2016” written in chalk around campus. They went to see the president of Emory to demand that he take punitive and protective action. The story is now drawing international wonder and scorn. How can this be happening in the cradle of modern democracy?

A surprisingly complete explanation of what is happening at Emory was offered by two sociologists in 2014 who described a new moral order they called “victimhood culture.” I summarized that article last September on my blog at RighteousMind.com, but that was before the campus protests began at Missouri, Yale, and elsewhere. The events of the last 6 months, and the long lists of demands issued by students at 77 universities, have provided stunning validation of the analysis offered in the article. I am therefore reprinting my summary of the article here at Heterodox Academy. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of campus protests. It is particularly important for current college students who are at risk of being turned into “moral dependents” by this rapidly spreading moral matrix. Here is that summary:

I just read the most extraordinary paper by two sociologists — Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning — explaining why concerns about microaggressions have erupted on many American college campuses in just the past few years. In brief: We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling.

Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized. It is the very presence of such administrative bodies, within a culture that is highly egalitarian and diverse (i.e., many college campuses) that gives rise to intense efforts to identify oneself as a fragile and aggrieved victim. This is why we have seen the recent explosion of concerns about microaggressions, combined with demands for trigger warnings and safe spaces, that Greg Lukianoff and I wrote about in The Coddling of the American Mind.

I want to make the ideas in the article widely available. It’s a fairly long article, so I provide below an outline of its main sections with extensive quotations from each section. My hope is that you can read the text below and get 80% of the value of the article in just 7 minutes.

In what follows, all text is copied and pasted directly from the published article, [except for comments from me, which are in brackets.] I have also bolded the lines that are most important for understanding the phenomena described in The Coddling of the American Mind.The key idea is that the new moral culture of victimhood fosters “moral dependence” and an atrophying of the ability to handle small interpersonal matters on one’s own. At the same time that it weakens individuals, it creates a society of constant and intense moral conflict as people compete for status as victims or as defenders of victims.

1) INTRODUCTION
Conflict occurs when someone defines another’s behavior as deviant – as immoral or otherwise objectionable…. Conflict and social control are both ubiquitous and diverse, as the issues that spark grievances and ways of handling them vary enormously across social settings. Here we address changing patterns of conflict in modern societies by focusing on a new species of social control that is increasingly common at American colleges and universities: the publicizing of microaggressions. [p.693]… As we dissect this phenomenon, then, we first address how it fits into a larger class of conflict tactics in which the aggrieved seek to attract and mobilize the support of third parties. We note that these tactics sometimes involve building a case for action by documenting, exaggerating, or even falsifying offenses. We address the social logic by which such tactics operate and the social conditions likely to produce them – those that encourage aggrieved individuals to rely on third parties to manage their conflicts, but make obtaining third party support problematic. We then turn to the content of the grievances expressed in microaggression complaints and related forms of social control, which focus on inequality and emphasize the dominance of offenders and the oppression of the aggrieved.

We argue that the social conditions that promote complaints of oppression and victimization overlap with those that promote case-building attempts to attract third parties. When such social conditions are all present in high degrees, the result is a culture of victimhood in which individuals and groups display high sensitivity to slight, have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties, and seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance. [See DeScioli & Kurzban for more on the urgency of appealing to third parties] We contrast the culture of victimhood with cultures of honor and cultures of dignity.[p.695]

2) DEPENDENCE ON THIRD PARTIESA) Gossip, Protest, and Complaint
Of the many ways people bring their grievances to the attention of third parties, perhaps the most common is to complain privately to family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances. This is called gossip – “evaluative talk about a person who is not present.” … Both individualized and collective conflicts might be brought to the attention of authority figures asked to punish the offender or otherwise handle the case. Small children often bring their complaints to adults, for example, while adults might bring their complaints to the legal system (e.g., Baumgartner 1992). Explaining the rise of microaggression complaints, then, requires that we explain the conditions that lead individuals to bring their problems before third parties. We suggest that the same factors that increase reliance on third parties in general encourage the public documenting of grievances in particular.

B) The Structural Logic of Moral Dependence
There are several circumstances that make individuals more likely to rely on third parties rather than their own devices. One factor is law. Historically, the growth of law has undermined various forms of unilateral social control. In times and places with little or no legal authority to protect property, settle disputes, or punish wrongdoers, people frequently handle such problems on their own through violent aggression – a phenomenon that students of law and social control refer to as “self-help”… Legal authority can potentially supplant other mechanisms of social control, from milder forms of self-help to negotiated compromise and mediation. Insofar as people come to depend on law alone, their willingness or ability to use other forms of conflict management may atrophy, leading to a condition Black refers to as “legal overdependency” (1989:77).[p.697]

Similarly, a college or university administration might handle conflicts among students and faculty. Educational institutions not only police such academic misconduct as cheating and plagiarism, but increasingly enact codes forbidding interpersonal offenses…. But note that reliance on third parties extends beyond reliance on authorities. Even if no authoritative action is taken, gossip and public shaming can be powerful sanctions. And even those who ultimately seek authoritative action might have to mobilize the support of additional third parties to convince authorities to act. Indeed, the core of much modern activism, from protest rallies to leaflet campaigns to publicizing offenses on websites, appears to be concerned with rallying enough public support to convince authorities to act. [p.698]

3) CAMPAIGNING FOR SUPPORT
A second notable feature of microaggression websites is that they do not merely call attention to a single offense, but seek to document a series of offenses that, taken together, are more severe than any individual incident. As the term “micro” implies, the slights and insults are acts that many would consider to be only minor offenses and that others might not deem offensive at all. As noted on the Oberlin Microaggressions site, for example, its purpose is to show that acts of “racist, heterosexist/ homophobic, anti-Semitic, classist, ableists, sexist/cissexist speech etc.” are “not simply isolated incidents, but rather part of structural inequalities” (Oberlin Microaggressions 2013). These sites hope to mobilize and sustain support for a moral crusade against such injustice by showing that the injustices are more severe than observers might realize.

A) The Structural Logic of Partisanship
Black’s theory of partisanship identifies two conditions that make support from third parties more likely. First, third parties are more likely to act as partisans when they are socially closer to one side of the conflict than to the other, as they take the side of the socially closer disputant (Black 1998:126)… Any social tie or social similarity a third party shares with one disputant but not the other increases the chance of partisanship. Second, third parties are more likely to act as partisans when one side of a conflict is higher in status than the other, as they take the side of the higher-status disputant (Black 1998:126). [p.700]… But note that these campaigns for support do not necessarily emanate from the lowest reaches of society – that they are not primarily stocked or led by those who are completely lacking in property, respectability, education, or other forms of social status. Rather, such forms as microaggression complaints and protest demonstrations appear to flourish among the relatively educated and affluent populations of American colleges and universities. The socially down and out are so inferior to third parties that they are unlikely to campaign for their support, just as they are unlikely to receive it. [p.701].

B) Partisanship and Conflict Severity
[This is a long section on how partisanship leads some participants to magnify, exaggerate, or even invent transgressions that never happened]

4) DOMINATION AS DEVIANCE
A third notable feature of microaggression complaints is that the grievances focus on inequality and oppression – especially inequality and oppression based on cultural characteristics such as gender or ethnicity. Conduct is offensive because it perpetuates or increases the domination of some persons and groups by others.

A) Microaggression as Overstratification
According to Black (2011), as noted above, changes in stratification, intimacy, and diversity cause conflict. Microaggression complaints are largely about changes in stratification. They document actions said to increase the level of inequality in a social relationship – actions Black refers to as “overstratification.” Overstratification offenses occur whenever anyone rises above or falls below others in status. [Therefore…] a morality that privileges equality and condemns oppression is most likely to arise precisely in settings that already have relatively high degrees of equality… In modern Western societies, egalitarian ethics have developed alongside actual political and economic equality. As women moved into the workforce in large numbers, became increasingly educated, made inroads into highly paid professions such as law and medicine, and became increasingly prominent in local, state, and national politics, sexism became increasingly deviant. The taboo has grown so strong that making racist statements, even in private, might jeopardize the careers of celebrities or the assets of businessmen (e.g., Fenno, Christensen, and Rainey 2014; Lynch 2013). [p.706-707] [In other words, as progress is made toward a more equal and humane society, it takes a smaller and smaller offense to trigger a high level of outrage. The goalposts shift, allowing participants to maintain a constant level of anger and constant level of perceived victimization.]

B) Microaggression as underdiversity
Microaggression offenses also tend to involve what Black calls “underdiversity” – the rejection of a culture. Large acts of underdiversity include things like genocide or political oppression, while smaller acts include ethnic jokes or insults. The publicizers of microaggressions are concerned with the latter, as well as more subtle, perhaps inadvertent, cultural slights…. Just as overstratification conflict varies inversely with stratification, underdiversity conflict varies directly with diversity (Black 2011:139). Attempts to increase stratification, we saw, are more deviant where stratification is at a minimum; likewise, attempts to decrease diversity are more deviant where diversity is at a maximum. In modern Western societies, an ethic of cultural tolerance – and often incompatibly, intolerance of intolerance – has developed in tandem with increasing diversity. Since microaggression offenses normally involve overstratification and underdiversity, intense concern about such offenses occurs at the intersection of the social conditions conducive to the seriousness of each. It is in egalitarian and diverse settings – such as at modern American universities – that equality and diversity are most valued, and it is in these settings that perceived offenses against these values are most deviant. [p.707]. [Again, the paradox: places that make the most progress toward equality and diversity can expect to have the “lowest bar” for what counts as an offense against equality and inclusivity. Some colleges have lowered the bar so far that an innocent question, motivated by curiosity, such as “where are you from” is now branded as an act of aggression.]

C) Victimhood as Virtue
When the victims publicize microaggressions they call attention to what they see as the deviant behavior of the offenders. In doing so they also call attention to their own victimization. Indeed, many ways of attracting the attention and sympathy of third parties emphasize or exacerbate the low status of the aggrieved. People portray themselves as oppressed by the powerful – as damaged, disadvantaged, and needy. [They describe such practices going back to ancient Rome and India] … But why emphasize one’s victimization?Certainly the distinction between offender and victim always has moral significance, lowering the offender’s moral status. In the settings such as those that generate microaggression catalogs, though, where offenders are oppressors and victims are the oppressed, it also raises the moral status of the victims. This only increases the incentive to publicize grievances, and it means aggrieved parties are especially likely to highlight their identity as victims, emphasizing their own suffering and innocence. Their adversaries are privileged and blameworthy, but they themselves are pitiable and blameless. [p.707-708] [This is the great tragedy: the culture of victimization rewards people for taking on a personal identity as one who is damaged, weak, and aggrieved. This is a recipe for failure — and constant litigation — after students graduate from college and attempt to enter the workforce]

5) THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF MICROAGGRESSION
In sum, microaggression catalogs are a form of social control in which the aggrieved collect and publicize accounts of intercollective offenses, making the case that relatively minor slights are part of a larger pattern of injustice and that those who suffer them are socially marginalized and deserving of sympathy. [The social conditions that give rise to this form of social control] include a social setting with cultural diversity and relatively high levels of equality, though with the presence of strongly superior third parties such as legal officials and organizational administrators… Under these conditions, individuals are likely to express grievances about oppression, and aggrieved individuals are likely to depend on the aid of third parties, to cast a wide net in their attempt to find supporters, and to campaign for support by emphasizing their own need against a bullying adversary. [p.710]

Several social trends encourage the growth of these forms of social control, particularly in the United States. Since the rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, racial, sexual, and other forms of intercollective inequality have declined, resulting in a more egalitarian society in which members are much more sensitive to those inequalities that remain.The last few decades have seen the continued growth of legal and administrative authority, including growth in the size and scope of university administrations and in the salaries of top administrators and the creation of specialized agencies of social control, such as offices whose sole purpose to increase “social justice” by combatting racial, ethnic, or other intercollective offenses (Lukianoff 2012:69–73). Social atomization has increased, undermining the solidary networks that once encouraged confrontational modes of social control and provided individuals with strong partisans, while at the same timemodern technology has allowed for mass communication to a virtual sea of weak partisans. This last trend has been especially dramatic during the past decade, with the result that aggrieved individuals can potentially appeal to millions of third parties. [P. 710] …As social media becomes ever more ubiquitous, the ready availability of the court of public opinion may make public disclosure of offenses an increasingly likely course of action. As advertising one’s victimization becomes an increasingly reliable way to attract attention and support, modern conditions may even lead to the emergence of a new moral culture. [In other words: progress toward greater equality and inclusiveness, combined with the enormous growth of administrators and other “adults” on campus charged with adjudicating complaints about verbal behavior, plus social atomization, multiplied by the power of social media, explains why charges of “microaggression” have emerged so rapidly on some college campuses just in the last few years.]

6) THE EVOLUTION OF MORAL CULTURE
Social scientists have long recognized a distinction between societies with a “culture of honor” and those with a “culture of dignity”…. The moral evolution of modern Western society can be understood as a transition between these two cultures. [p. 711-712]

A) A Culture of Honor
Honor is a kind of status attached to physical bravery and the unwillingness to be dominated by anyone. Honor in this sense is a status that depends on the evaluations of others, and members of honor societies are expected to display their bravery by engaging in violent retaliation against those who offend them (Cooney 1998:108–109; Leung and Cohen 2011). Accordingly, those who engage in such violence often say that the opinions of others left them no choice at all…. In honor cultures, it is one’s reputation that makes one honorable or not, and one must respond aggressively to insults, aggressions, and challenges or lose honor. Not to fight back is itself a kind of moral failing, such that “in honor cultures, people are shunned or criticized not for exacting vengeance but for failing to do so” (Cooney 1998:110). Honorable people must guard their reputations, so they are highly sensitive to insult, often responding aggressively to what might seem to outsiders as minor slights (Cohen et al. 1996; Cooney 1998:115–119; Leung and Cohen 2011)… Cultures of honor tend to arise in places where legal authority is weak or nonexistent and where a reputation for toughness is perhaps the only effective deterrent against predation or attack (Cooney 1998:122; Leung and Cohen 2011:510).Because of their belief in the value of personal bravery and capability, people socialized into a culture of honor will often shun reliance on law or any other authority even when it is available, refusing to lower their standing by depending on another to handle their affairs (Cooney 1998:122–129). But historically, as state authority has expanded and reliance on the law has increased, honor culture has given way to something else: a culture of dignity. [p. 712-713]

B) A Culture of Dignity
The prevailing culture in the modern West is one whose moral code is nearly the exact opposite of that of an honor culture. Rather than honor, a status based primarily on public opinion, people are said to have dignity, a kind of inherent worth that cannot be alienated by others (Berger 1970; see also Leung and Cohen 2011). Dignity exists independently of what others think, so a culture of dignity is one in which public reputation is less important. Insults might provoke offense, but they no longer have the same importance as a way of establishing or destroying a reputation for bravery. It is even commendable to have “thick skin” that allows one to shrug off slights and even serious insults, and in a dignity-based society parents might teach children some version of “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” – an idea that would be alien in a culture of honor (Leung and Cohen 2011:509). People are to avoid insulting others, too, whether intentionally or not, and in general an ethic of self-restraint prevails.

When intolerable conflicts do arise, dignity cultures prescribe direct but non-violent actions, such as negotiated compromise geared toward solving the problem (Aslani et al. 2012). Failing this, or if the offense is sufficiently severe, people are to go to the police or appeal to the courts. Unlike the honorable, the dignified approve of appeals to third parties and condemn those who “take the law into their own hands.” For offenses like theft, assault, or breach of contract, people in a dignity culture will use law without shame. But in keeping with their ethic of restraint and toleration, it is not necessarily their first resort, and they might condemn many uses of the authorities as frivolous. People might even be expected to tolerate serious but accidental personal injuries…. The ideal in dignity cultures is thus to use the courts as quickly, quietly, and rarely as possible. The growth of law, order, and commerce in the modern world facilitated the rise of the culture of dignity, which largely supplanted the culture of honor among the middle and upper classes of the West…. But the rise of microaggression complaints suggests a new direction in the evolution of moral culture.

C) A Culture of Victimhood
Microaggression complaints have characteristics that put them at odds with both honor and dignity cultures. Honorable people are sensitive to insult, and so they would understand that microaggressions, even if unintentional, are severe offenses that demand a serious response. But honor cultures value unilateral aggression and disparage appeals for help. Public complaints that advertise or even exaggerate one’s own victimization and need for sympathy would be anathema to a person of honor – tantamount to showing that one had no honor at all. Members of a dignity culture, on the other hand, would see no shame in appealing to third parties, but they would not approve of such appeals for minor and merely verbal offenses. Instead they would likely counsel either confronting the offender directly to discuss the issue, or better yet, ignoring the remarks altogether.[p.714-715]

A culture of victimhood is one characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties. People are intolerant of insults, even if unintentional, and react by bringing them to the attention of authorities or to the public at large. Domination is the main form of deviance, and victimization a way of attracting sympathy, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization. … Under such conditions complaint to third parties has supplanted both toleration and negotiation. People increasingly demand help from others, and advertise their oppression as evidence that they deserve respect and assistance. Thus we might call this moral culture a culture of victimhood because the moral status of the victim, at its nadir in honor cultures, has risen to new heights.[p.715]

The culture of victimhood is currently most entrenched on college campuses, where microaggression complaints are most prevalent. Other ways of campaigning for support from third parties and emphasizing one’s own oppression – from protest demonstrations to the invented victimization of hate-crime hoaxes – are prevalent in this setting as well. That victimhood culture is so evident among campus activists might lead the reader to believe this is entirely a phenomenon of the political left, and indeed, the narrative of oppression and victimization is especially congenial to the leftist worldview (Haidt 2012:296; Kling 2013; Smith 2003:82). But insofar as they share a social environment, the same conditions that lead the aggrieved to use a tactic against their adversaries encourage their adversaries to use that tactic as well. For instance, hate crime hoaxes do not all come from the left. [gives examples] … Naturally, whenever victimhood (or honor, or anything else) confers status, all sorts of people will want to claim it. As clinical psychologist David J. Ley notes, the response of those labeled as oppressors is frequently to “assert that they are a victim as well.” Thus, “men criticized as sexist for challenging radical feminism defend themselves as victims of reverse sexism, [and] people criticized as being unsympathetic proclaim their own history of victimization.”[p.715] [In this way, victimhood culture causes a downward spiral of competitive victimhood. Young people on the left and the right get sucked into its vortex of grievance. We can expect political polarization to get steadily worse in the coming decades as this moral culture of victimhood spreads]

7) CONCLUSIONS
The emerging victimhood culture appears to share [dignity culture’s] disdain for risk, but it does condone calling attention to oneself [as in an honor culture] as long as one is calling attention to one’s own hardships – to weaknesses rather than strengths and to exploitation rather than exploits. For example, students writing personal statements as part of their applications for colleges and graduate schools often write not of their academic achievements but instead – with the encouragement of the universities – about overcoming adversity such as a parent’s job loss or having to shop at thrift stores (Lieber 2014). And in a setting where people increasingly eschew toleration and publicly air complaints to compel official action, personal discomfort looms large in official policy. For example, consider recent calls for “trigger warnings” in college classes or on course syllabuses to forewarn students they are about to exposed to topics that cause them distress… [This is a clear link between microaggressions and trigger warnings — both make sense in a moral culture of victimhood]

What we are seeing in these controversies is the clash between dignity and victimhood, much as in earlier times there was a clash between honor and dignity…. At universities and many other environments within modern America and, increasingly, other Western nations, the clash between dignity and victimhood engenders a similar kind of moral confusion: One person’s standard provokes another’s grievance, acts of social control themselves are treated as deviant, and unintentional offenses abound. And the conflict will continue. As it does each side will make its case, attracting supporters and winning or losing various battles. But remember that the moral concepts each side invokes are not free-floating ideas; they are reflections of social organization. Microaggression complaints and other specimens of victimhood occur in atomized and diverse settings that are fairly egalitarian except for the presence of strong and stable authority. In these settings behaviors that jeopardize equality or demean minority cultures are rare and those that occur mostly minor, but in this context even minor offenses – or perceived offenses – cause much anguish. And while the authorities and others might be sympathetic, their support is not automatic. Add to this mix modern communication technologies that make it easy to publicize grievances, and the result, as we have seen, is the rise of a victimhood culture.[p.718]

[So now it should be clear why the first response of some (not most) Emory students, upon seeing “Trump 2016” written in chalk, was to claim that they felt fearful and threatened, and to run to the president of the university, James Wagner, to convince him to act. Which he did, thereby validating their beliefs and strengthening victimhood culture at Emory. Trump holds views on race that are far outside of what was the mainstream before last year, so one could argue that this event is not a mirror image of someone writing “Hillary 2016.” (See Conor Friedersdorf on this point.) But still, the students chose to impute the worst possible intent to the writer, they reacted in the most fearful way possible among all the available choices, even though none of the chalkings were threatening or racist, and they came together to demand action from the president, even though it was not clear that any action was needed. This is exactly the response that Manning and Campbell’s essay leads us to predict from students who had fully embraced victimhood culture. Anti-Trump students who had not embraced victimhood would have engaged in “self-help”: they would have simply erased the chalkings or written their own anti-Trump messages. Why bring in president Wagner?

At Heterodox Academy, we believe that victimhood culture is more likely to flourish when there is a lack of political diversity on campus — when there are no faculty members or administrators who are willing or able to challenge the political and psychological assumptions of the most radical students, and when libertarian and conservative students feel that they must keep quiet. We believe that exposure to viewpoint diversity, including political diversity, is essential preparation for life in a democracy. Universities that do not offer viewpoint diversity in their classrooms can expect to have students who panic when they encounter viewpoint diversity on their sidewalks.]

I just want to say how impressed I am by both this article and everyone commenting here. It’s such a thought-provoking topic, and everyone’s contributions are civil and substantive.

I feel this victimhood culture is not sustainable, just like any culture of oppression isn’t without tremendous violence. With the San Jose rally, I realized we’re at a point where ideologically sanctioned violence is celebrated by the left when it is perpetuated by the victim du jour. And whether or not it was organized in advance is irrelevant because the main narrative being told is that a victim can only be pushed so far by mean words. A system like this simply won’t last before all-out war occurs, and I’d like to hope the balance of power in government will stop swinging so radically left before then. We have the tools in our government(for now) but enough people need to want it.

If not, I suppose we will live in a self-sustaining victimhood culture of victimizing the “other” to keep the victim pools flowing. I don’t like that.

I think what is missing in this emergence of victimhood is that part of this shift emerged in the context of the criminal justice system where ‘victimhood’ is a political tactic used to get everyone to identify with get tough policies (because we are all potential victims). Think of things like Megan’s Law to tap into this culture of victimhood to support draconian measures.

I think this story ignores that the aspect of ‘micro-aggressions’ really are attempts to claim some of that discursive space of ‘victim’ which was predominantly a 1990s tactic to allow for aggressive policing and shore up state authority (see particularly Garland’s good the Culture of Control 2001 and Best’s 1990 book Threatened Children).

The argument which has worked in a culture of victimhood is that we need a strong state and we need to give up more of our rights because we don’t want to be victims (I believe Trump taps into this same space particularly in regards to being victims of China’s work ethic, Mexican criminal migrants, ISIS led terrorism etc).

Victimhood is a powerful discursive space where multiple parties are tapping into — I don’t think it is a ‘new epoch’ as the authors suggest — it is a new concern that is related to things like institutions that are risk averse and worried about litigation.

I read this article and the comments with great interest. But contrary to the majority of comments indicating Liberalism as the source of the culture of victimization, I see the whiny and angry tone of conservative Fox News to pre-date and therefore contribute to the current victimization culture.

Might Dependence on Third Parties also be at least in part a fallout from the moral matrix that has a greater tendency to put its trust in “experts” and enlightened elites to design, construct and administer the “good society” from the top down?

In general, American conservatives (who would not be considered conservative anywhere in the Old World) love equality of opportunity but don’t care much about equality of outcome – with the chief obstacle being that some do not recognize when opportunity is in fact unequal. It is American progressives (“liberals” who are not classically liberal) who make noise about wanting equal outcomes – likely as a means of signaling, as many take active steps to stay at the top of the social pyramid, which is to say that they take active steps to prevent others from becoming their social equals even while pretending to do the opposite.

However, I am replying here primarily because of this comment:

“will we continue to allow our individual and communal lives be governed by nasty anonymous postings?”

I hear a lot about the “dangers” and “ill effects” of anonymous speech, but I would like to point out the many advantages as well. For one thing, in an atmosphere in which it can be social and professional suicide to speak the truth, much less mere opinion, the availability of anonymous speech has been a godsend. I have found that anonymously pseudonymous online communities have presented opportunies for honest discussions that are difficult if not impossible to find elsewhere. On the other hand, I have found “true name” policies to be an assurance of “true numbskullery” on any controversial matter. I should note that I am very pleased that Heterodox Academy has not made it impossible to comment anonymously. (How seriously do I take this? I am accessing this site via Tor.)

Anonymous online speech is a lifeline for those who have been targeted for harassment or destruction by their real world communities. Curiously enough in these communities I have also found the most useful conversations crossing ideological lines, but more important is that these communities allow such individuals to speak up even when private censorship or government violence attempts to stop them. Since you refer to de Tocqueville you may recall his comments on the importance of freedom of the press in allowing the afflicted to seek assistance in a non-feudal society. Whereas the traditional press has more than neglected this role even in places such as the U.S. and the U.K., anonymous sites and anonymous networks have risen up to do the job and this is a good thing. Even from the perspective of a government that seeks total control, anonymous speech is vital – because without it those who are governing would be unlikely to hear about abuses and errors by their underlings until it is far too late and active opposition is under way: even a failed revolution is costly. Good feedback requires honest speech, and that sometimes requires anonymity.

Many thanks to Jonathan Haidt for the alert. It is indeed a thought-provoking article. A couple random observations, though. “Honor” can be the basis for a whole culture because it represents a good that people seek, and would acknowledge seeking. Same for “dignity.” “Victimhood” cannot be the basis for a culture because no one would acknowledge seeking it, and yet the authors do make a pretty convincing case that it evokes a whole pattern of behavior, not unlike for “honor” and “dignity.” So a name will have to be found for it if it is really a culture. It may instead simply end up being a pathology, which is how most of the commentators here, including myself, seem to regard it.

Second, the authors never mention Tocqueville, but their findings really are a kind of “Tocqueville moment.” For it was Tocqueville who, while cautiously embracing the new authority of “equality” as a governing value for democratic society, nonetheless feared that as the goal of equality approached, the desire to achieve it would become ever more feverish. I predict that little progress will ever occur in our own predicament unless and until it somehow becomes broadly acceptable to acknowledge that “equality” is a topic fit for critical scrutiny, rather than simply a totem for scoring rhetorical points.

Third, I think the authors might have placed more emphasis on social media, which by amplifying anonymous speech—whether by provocateurs or by genuine racists and sexists (think YikYak e.g.)—has injected a new and exogenous element to the equation that makes victimhood pathology seem to me a bit less overdetermined than the authors suggest. To me, one of the intriguing imponderables is, will we as a society adapt to this new technology by spontaneously developing new norms, rules of decorum and the like that will have the effect of toning down some of the feverish sensitivity we’ve seen in the last 3 years or so? Or will we continue to allow our individual and communal lives be governed by nasty anonymous postings?

It does have a name, Liberalism, and -ALL shame (Projection) with NO guilt (Introspection) is indeed pathological. No one would acknowledge seeking slavery, yet millions freely choose Socialism, which is in fact the suborning of your own choices for societies choices, making you their slave. Those who promote socialism fain suborning their needs, when it is only your needs that ever get suborned. These are mechanisms of projection, as is Liberalisms projection of victimhood. A shame culture is a culture of projection as well. Guilt is an INTERNAL mechanism, where you hold yourself accountable for a transgression as opposed to Shame which is projected upon you by others, OTHERS (plural) being the key. All Projection cultures tend to be collectivist mob driven but there is no such thing as Collective Morality. Which by the way is the fatal flaw with ALL Collectivist ideologies.

Clearly an object for one’s compassionate concern and a malefactor worthy of condemnation stimulate one’s care-harm moral palate. Throughout history and literature, concern for the victims of oppression as led to many noble sacrifices, such as those who risked everything to fight fighting slavery or those who volunteered in the Spanish Civil War. At the core of Christianity is the story of One who died to save all from the oppression of sin.

In a victimhood culture, not only are people induced to proclaim and celebrate their weaknesses and inability to care for themselves, there is a tendency to pervert the satisfactions of the care-harm flavor. The outrage one feels upon discovering a victim confirms that one is a good person. To be full of compassion for the injured and righteous indignation – even hatred – for the oppressor, validates one’s own worth. The danger is that, if one does not also have other moral flavors reinforcing one’s self-worth, one will be perpetually seeking victims and oppressors, not to rescue or condemn, but for one’s own sake. Hence, the rise of the class of the perpetually aggrieved, people who are habitually outraged but lack motive to actually fix the situations that agitate them because it is from those situations that they derive their self-respect. Then when situations do improve, they focus on smaller and smaller offenses.

I wonder how much special interest groups contribute to it. It seems almost every worthy “cause” has a non-profit group promoting its interests. NOW, NAACP, PETA, NRA, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, pro life groups, pro choice groups, La Raza, and on and on. Hundreds of these organizations with annual budgets in the many billions. It seems like the wealthier and more affluent we become as a society, and the more laws we enact in pursuit of egalitarian principles, the more these groups proliferate. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have been persuading billionaires to pledge to give at least half their fortunes away, so I suspect the proliferation of these groups will continue to explode in future years.

Many of these groups have affiliated student organizations on college campus. Again, I wonder how much they are contributing to victimhood culture.

I would disagree in one respect. Inner city Black culture is an honor culture, a dueling culture.

A central concern in the ghetto is being “dissed” or “disrespected”. If one is “dissed” (laughed at, ignored, ridiculed, etc.) it is perfectly acceptable to respond by attacking or killing the offender.

The problem in the Black community is that they have not adopted civilized dueling rules (the “Code Duello”) to protect innocent bystanders (women and children) and to permit an offender to preserve his life by declining a challenge and losing face.

Exactly. Which leads to an interesting question: given the prominence of black females in so many of these campus brouhahas, are we perhaps seeing the transfer of the female side of an existing honor culture (as several commentators have described it above) into the college mainstream?

When the state is sufficiently powerful, the only legal way to get something done is through the state. Those cultures which say what the state (the ruling class or clerisy + cronies) wants to hear and ask for what the state wants done will succeed at others’ expense. Large centralized parasitic governments tend to be nasty; it’s unsurprising that the cultures they promote are also.

The victimhood culture is a direct result of the removal of civic education from our public classrooms.

The United States of America is exceptional because of the set of share ideals (Democracy, Rights, Liberty, Opportunity, and Equality) protected from government by the Constitution.

These ideas that enabled Americans, fewer than 5% of the world’s population, to produce the greatest economy in the history of humankind, are no longer taught to young people.

These campus snowflakes we see crying about chalked words are instead taught that America is exploitative, racist, greedy, and evil.

The Democrat Party is in control of public schools and major media and it uses both as its political arms.

These ignorant and over-privileged students are themselves victims of the leftist campaign to divide Americans by race, gender, sexual orientation, class, education, geography and any other group identity that gives them political advantage.

They hate the American ideas that elevated us above those age-old divisions and want nothing more than a regression to tribalism.

This is INDEED a Clash of Ideologies. Individual Free Will vs. Leftist Slavery to …(fill in the blank) Here is an excellent example of the two competing system in direct parallel to each other. Niall Fergusons “Civilization: The West and the rest” is a very enlightened look at the West, especially his comparison of the “New World Twins” North and South America. They were almost identical twins, having the same indigenous populations, natural resources, weather and potential for cultivation, yet they couldn’t have grown up to be more different. Why? Individual private property that’s why. PBS turned it into a splendid show well worth watching and Niall is a pretty straight shooter, but being a Brit he has a couple socialist blind spots. Be that as it may, he likes to talk about the “Killer Apps” developed in N. America, it’s some very insightful stuff. I contend you need a “Killer OS” for the apps to work and N. Americas “Killer OS”, not seen anywhere else was ‘Individual Free Will’. Individual private property rights and Individual Free Will are two sides of the same coin. But in South America all you had was the same old colonial servitude, universal SLAVERY for the immigrants and indigenous alike. Of course, individual private property is individual capital. Corporate Capitalism, when you COLLECTIVIZE it, you lose that anchor of INDIVIDUAL morality and that is when it (unbridled capitalism) can all go off the rails, because there IS no such thing as Collective morality. Which by the way is the fatal flaw with ALL Collectivist ideologies. But I digress…

I think that the effects of social media act as a powerful catalyst here because it allows the victim to offer a one sided account of the slight they have experienced and then “the people” (be they followers or your social circle) offer retweets and likes as a form of voting. This up or down vote serves to legitimize or delegitimize your victimhood status. If your slight goes viral you are suddenly Joan of Ark about to be lit on fire or you are hopelessly mistaken and subsequently mobbed. The goal of the exercise is to achieve moral absolution through a kind of martyrdom-by-victimization. You may also rapidly gain a cadre of co-dependant sympathizers there to dine on the leftovers of your martyrdom but you will remain in the center of the circle as the alpha victim. This is a form of celebrity as well because much of social media is celebrity culture driven, imagine if someone with a few million followers were to take up your cause! you too can suddenly become last weeks “Sad Papaw” whose grand kids didn’t show up to eat those burgers. thats the brass ring right there.

In addition to this, I suspect that the internet environment has a tendency to create little “tribes” of groupthink. People are discussing how concepts like microaggressions, trigger warnings, etc. came out of specific strands of academia – seems worth mentioning that in neither case are these strands psychology, but instead gender studies/etc – and can flourish in those environment because there’s no pushback. That’s kind of the point of this blog in general.

The internet has this same impact, except much stronger (internet communities deal ONLY with ideas) and much easier to replicate (even television show fandoms tend to develop their own “societal” rules on things like social justice – I have examples if you don’t believe me). There was another post about high schools where 16-year olds have internalized this victimhood culture stuff. While I’m sure the high schools may promote certain ideas themselves, and that blog was focused on liberal neighborhoods, anyone who has spent time jumping into the realm of “social justice” discourse on the internet knows exactly the kinds of responses you’ll hear from Emory chalk protesters or high school students evaluating opinions based on race and gender. Like, to a script.

These internet communities also tend to have a pretty simplistic way to deal with people who challenge orthodoxy – ban them. More specifically, have a moderator (a third party authority figure!) ban them. AND these communities are going to be best understood by the millennial and under crowd – no offense to the over 35 readers here, generalizing 😉 – who came of age with this kind of technology. AND I’d bet dollars to donuts that upper class kids are the ones spending the most time on the internet, especially the geekier/deeper portions of the internet, in general.

So in short, agreed, social media and the internet should be explored in this context.

I believe the culture of victimhood is sustainable outside of universities. The article highlights “the creation of specialized agencies of social control, such as offices whose sole purpose to increase “social justice” by combatting racial, ethnic, or other intercollective offenses (Lukianoff 2012:69–73).” Such officials are multiplying in large employment bureaucracies of all sorts, especially in government. Most people in those bureaucracies will want to remain in dignity-culture, but will be dragged inexorably into victimhood-culture. I suspect that even in universities dignity is still far more common.

As to what causes all this, there are a wealth of nominees in addition to the ones suggested in the article: increased litigiousness; fewer children per household; increased competition with siblings who are less-related or unrelated because of divorce, abandonment, and poor blending of families; competition among authorities as to who will be the arbiter and thus have higher status; moral relativism leading to worship of power (Rick Wade, above); an unadmitted reliance on meritocracy combined with an inability to accept its consequences; the collision of rules for men and rules for women in unresolvable ways (Baldur, above). These are, as I said, nominees. I don’t know which if any are the real culprits

Assistant, I agree with your first paragraph completely. Victimhood culture will spread to large companies also, any entity in the public eye will be beholden to the purveyors of victimhood, the mainstream media. I stated in an earlier comment that I didn’t believe it was sustainable, but more precisely, I meant the culture it leads to is not sustainable in the real world for long.

However, I disagree with your second paragraph in that it misses the elephant in the room. The university culture is driven by serious leftists seeking more power. This is part of that drive. If one looks only at their behavior and its consequences, one sees something very different from their claimed intentions. Wrongs are never righted, genuine solutions are never found. In fact, college presidents, admin, faculty and students who disagree are shunned and often are forced, or choose, to leave campus. These are the consequences.

The other elephant in the room is that it is perfectly fine to macro-agress if the target is conservative, Zionist, white, police, Christian … you get the picture.

Zionists can blame themselves for pioneering victim culture. One only needs to look at Europe where this sort of thing is in a more advanced state, and individuals have been successfully prosecuted for calling for a boycott of Israel (in France) and jailed for denying the Holocaust (in Germany and elsewhere). There is a long history of supporters of Israel in the U.S. accusing individuals making even relatively mild criticism of Israel (far short of anti-Zionism as such) with being anti-Semites.

Assistant Village Idiot – Since you laid out several of the possibilities mentioned including my own contribution, I thought this might be a good place to expand a little on the idea:

Masculine versus Feminine styles of resolving conflict – Males tend to be direct and in your face, Females tend to be indirect and often behind your back. Please note I do not say this in order to attack anyone – it is not to assign blame to anyone, or to denigrate one style of resolving conflict or the other. Both ways of resolving conflict can be good and useful, but I think it is important to recognize the difference and WHY this difference arises.

Put in simplest terms, men are physically stronger than women – and when one is physically strong one can be open and honest without fearing physical confrontation – at least, not too much. By contrast, a typical woman goes through life knowing that she will lose in ANY physical confrontation with a typical man, unless of course that man holds back. Of course we have adjusted our cultural expectations accordingly: we create strong disincentives for physical violence against women, and are far more concerned about violence against women than violence against men, despite the fact that men are far more likely to be victims of violence. This allows men and women to co-exist on something like an equal playing field, but it is still not quite the same, and biology may prevent it from ever being so.

So, because of this physical difference men seem to be more comfortable being open, honest, and direct – whereas women are more inclined to be guarded, ambiguous, and indirect – and it may not be just about physical strength, but biological inclinations such as those found in evolutionary processes such as self-domestication (or neoteny). There are differences between cultures and/or ethnicities (the Japanese seem to value ambiguity and indirectness, for example). I am under the impression that regardless of whether a culture prefers direct or indirect styles, men tend to be more direct than women – but perhaps I am wrong. This might be a good place for cross-cultural studies, especially to include the small number of cultures which are true matriarchies.

So – what does this mean for a university culture?

The first women to break into academia were proud to challenge males on their own domain – but we should recognize that these were extraordinary women of considerable mental fortitude. They did not change the culture as a whole both because they were few and because they adapted to the culture that was already there – a culture which valued rigorous debate and a fair and free exchange of ideas as the only way to discover the truth. Now women make up a majority of university students and we see the spectre of the recent debate at Yale where the FREE SPEECH side began with the provision that – NATURALLY – some ideas were beyond the pale. It is worth considering whether universities can withstand the influx of this sort of thinking, which seems to be more common among women. I think we underestimate the role of bravery and fortitude in our thought lives: nothing new will ever be thought, nothing new will ever be done, and no progress will ever be made unless we are BRAVE enough to confront the uncomfortable. There are many types of fear and many types of bravery, and many who are physically brave will be terrified of a new idea, and many who are physically fearful may nonetheless be fearless in the realm of ideas – but I wonder if there is some underlying biology that makes women generally more fearful than men? From an evolutionary perspective, I can certainly see that as a possibility: among males, the winners of contests nearly always demonstrated bravery; among females, those who demonstrated bravery against men would have almost always lost – and if they could never bring themselves to submit, they would likely have been killed. If there is a GENERAL quality of fearfulness, might it not – on average – mean that females are more likely to lack both physical and mental courage? Or are the circuits for physical and mental fortitude completely separate?

It is possible that such differences are entirely cultural instead of biological, or that the causes are a mixture of biology and culture. Regardless, the subject may be worthy of inquiry, and something that needs to be addressed if we hope to sustain a culture of free inquiry into the future.

As I said near the beginning, I am not going to judge whether directness or indirectness is “right” or “wrong”, “valuable” or “worthless”. Both have value within their spheres – but we should be careful about changing the mix too much, and should pay attention to what we are doing, lest we crowd out the engine of civilizational success.

There’s another issue at play here that perhaps needs more attention. That’s those who’re not claiming victimhood for themselves, which they might regard as insulting given their high status, but projecting victimhood on others in an effort to claim moral superiority.

Often they dislike both Group A and Group B, but carry out their aggression against Group A (say blue-collar whites) by claiming to defend Group B (say the black underclass) as victims. That’s precisely what’s happen with charges of (white, blue-collar) police brutality toward black criminals. It’s also why nothing in the behavior of the black criminal matters. Being a victim or victimizer are absolutes, independent of what either does.

In Ferguson, for instance, it did not matter that the black criminal had bullied and robbed a Pakistani store owner or that he attacked a much smaller cop, trying to take away the cop’s gun. Black criminals are considered victims no matter what they do. Cops are considered victimizers whatever they do. And of course, through out that process neither that Pakistani store owner nor the black victims of the black criminal class matter.

While I agree with much of what this paper claims, we also need to recognize that there is a hidden undercurrent that’s evil rather than just exaggerated or misguided good. This is nasty bigotry against two groups (poor and working poor whites and blacks) masquerading as anti-bigotry. It’s a lie and needs to be exposed as such.

–Michael W. Perry, co-author with Albion Tourgee of Lily’s Ride: Rescuing her Father from the Ku Klux Klan

I am so happy not to be the only person to have noticed this. Almost everything about the behavior of such college students is, in the context you mention, traditionally feminine. They desire security above all else. They value physical peace but utilize social manipulation to get what they want and to punish/destroy their enemies. They value compassion and their feelings far more highly than their parents’ generation at the same age. I could continue.

Of course the whole victimization culture was invented by the Marxists for the benefit of the workers (and Marx backdated it to the peasants being “hurled” off the land in the agricultural revolution).

But when ruling-class girls at elite universities are playing the victim game I think we can say that the victimization culture is about to collapse from its own internal contradictions.

When it comes to finding one’s own moral path, though, it comes down to some very fine and blurry lines. When is micro-aggression actually aggression? What are the criteria for deciding that? When does a shamed aggressor become a victim? How can we best empower people who feel they are victims to help themselves in constructive ways?

There are simply too many academics in our society, divorced from the reality of living outside the ivory tower, and with power disproportionate to their contribution. The victimhood culture is not sustainable outside of the university in other than a strict socialist economy and culture. And the strict socialism it necessitates is unsustainable in any human culture long term (the one understandable exception being Israel’s Kibutzim lasting about 40 years until Israel become more mature and stable).

I disagree that this is not a wholly leftist manifestation, indeed it is a resourceful power grab by the left. It is an attempt to suffocate the non-left out of the academic environment. It is hugely aggressive using “micro-aggressions” as a ploy to rid the last heterodox person from the campus.

Great piece. I hope this article circulates throughout academic circles. It has been a one-sided conversation for too long. Victimhood culture breeds widespread hopelessness and anger without any solution, other than the censorship or punishment of the micro-aggresor, even if the micro-aggresion was done so without intent. Since positivism is pushed strongly in many American institutions, I would love for Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning to write another piece explaining why this phenomena has taken such strong root among Millennial’s and the left. One would think that positivism would be in direct opposition to the hopeless ideology of drawing attention to the marginalization of races/genders etc. In social work we could call stealing another form of resourcefulness (wish I made that up)–In victimhood culture, we call hurt feelings a hate crime. To me it seems like an anomaly.

Interesting thesis. One thing that strikes me is that the rise in victimhood culture may have something to do with the increasing number of female students, who now make up the majority of students at most universities. Even in cultures of honor, females were not typically expected to defend themselves – on the contrary, men fought for the privilege to protect them from insults. This victimhood culture is therefore not necessarily new – it may simply be that the natural outgrowth of this demographic change has made this victimhood culture more visible.

I also found this paragraph to be interesting:

“Rather, such forms as microaggression complaints and protest demonstrations appear to flourish among the relatively educated and affluent populations of American colleges and universities. The socially down and out are so inferior to third parties that they are unlikely to campaign for their support, just as they are unlikely to receive it.”

Well, I can’t think of any group in America more socially down and out than pedophiles. I wonder what they might be saying about it:

“I wonder if the potential employers of these ‘students’ are paying attention.”

” ‘But some commentators on the university’s student newspaper website told the students to grow up and accused them of being babies.’ ”

But there is good news! I believe a new generation of girls are being taught to take more direct action rather than waiting for someone to do things for them. Consider the messages of such recent Disney films as “Brave” or “Frozen”, or the musical “Matilda”. Hopefully the culture of victimhood is at a high water mark and will soon recede.

Not sure I completely buy your thesis. In an honor culture, CERTAIN offenses to a woman’s honor would require her to appeal to a male for redress, but only when the person providing the offense was male. If a man made insinuations about a woman’s chastity, for instance, he might find himself challenged to a duel by her husband or by a man seeking to win her favor.
Even in honor societies, however, women offended by other women handled their grievances in other, usually non-violent, ways, such as social ostracization.
But that leads to an interesting thought that perhaps buttresses your theory, but not in a way you lay out. As with the bogus campus war on “sexual assault,” the goal of the activists is not to jail or otherwise legally punish the accused, but rather to make them social Untouchables. In that way, the activists very much act like women in an honor society.

Ben – Excellent point about social ostracism as the feminine counterpart to violence in an honor culture.

I might add that it has also been used historically in other cultures – it is, for example, the chief enforcement mechanism among the Amish.

Relatedly, British women during the First World War and Confederate women during the War Between the States had organized campaigns to shame young men to fight on their behalf, based on an agreement that all the women involved would shun any man who did not volunteer.

A good description of the victimhood culture, and a nice use of college victimization as an example, but there is no real explanation… It was perhaps predictable from Baby on Board signs 35 years ago, but describing it is not the same as explaining it.

When social conditions that promote complaints of oppression and victimization and case-building attempts to attract third parties are present in high degrees, the result is a culture of victimhood.

Circumstances that make individuals more likely to rely on third parties:

* The growth of law
* Educational institutions … increasingly enact codes forbidding interpersonal offenses
* The core of modern activism appears to be concerned with rallying enough public support to convince authorities to act.

Circumstances that heighten responses to minor slights:

* Grievances focus on inequality and oppression based on cultural characteristics such as gender or ethnicity.
* As progress is made toward a more equal and humane society, it takes a smaller and smaller offense to trigger a high level of outrage. The goalposts shift, allowing participants to maintain a constant level of anger and constant level of perceived victimization.
* Attempts to decrease diversity are more deviant where diversity is at a maximum. In modern Western societies, intolerance of intolerance has developed in tandem with increasing diversity.
* It is in egalitarian and diverse settings – such as at modern American universities – that perceived offenses against these values are most deviant.

Circumstances that reward self-victimization:

* Aggrieved parties are especially likely to highlight their identity as victims, while their adversaries are privileged and blameworthy.
* [The social conditions that give rise to this form of social control] include a social setting with cultural diversity and relatively high levels of equality, though with the presence of strongly superior third parties such as legal officials and organizational administrators

Several social trends encourage the growth of these forms of social control, particularly in the United States:

* Since the 1970s, racial, sexual, and other forms of intercollective inequality have declined, resulting in a society more sensitive to those inequalities that remain.
* The growth in size and scope of university administrations.
* Modern technology has allowed for mass communication to a virtual sea of weak partisans.
* The ready availability of the court of public opinion

Evolution of Western moral culture

Cultures of honor tend to arise in places where legal authority is weak or nonexistent.
As state authority has expanded and reliance on the law has increased, a culture of dignity arose.

A culture of dignity is one in which public reputation is less important. Unlike the honorable, the dignified approve of appeals to third parties and condemn those who “take the law into their own hands.” In keeping with their ethic of restraint and toleration, they might condemn many uses of the authorities as frivolous.

A culture of victimhood is one where:

* public reputation is highly important
* legal authority is strong
* domination is the main form of deviance

Whenever victimhood (or honor, or anything else) confers status, all sorts of people will want to claim it. The response of those labeled as oppressors is frequently to “assert that they are a victim as well.” Victimhood culture causes a downward spiral of competitive victimhood.

Quoted from the last bracketed comments above: A person writing the word “Trump” might hold racist views, and so this event is not exactly a mirror image of someone writing “Hillary 2016.”

Have I misread this? Does Jonathan Haidt believe that someone writing “Hillary 2016” is incapable of holding racist views? Is this some adherence to the idea that “only the majority race can be ‘racist’,” or has Haidt not thought this through?

Many mainstream left-wing positions in the United States are explicity racist. US Democrats used race-targeting as a tool before and after they pivoted on which races to discriminate against.

Reihan Salam (Slate) said on RealTime with Bill Mahar Friday that the sort of behavior seen at Emory won’t survive contact with reality outside of the University. Are there good reasons to think it can?

Doug, my observation has been that the deviant behavior in academia starts migrating to government organizations. Employees are protected from just about any grievance and largely immune from production requirements or business climate. Non-profits are also at risk and even large corporations dependent on crony relationships with governments start emulating these ridiculous practices..

Unfortunately Bill Mahar is all too wrong. As BatChainPuller notes, the ideas propagated in academia invariably manifest in gov’t organizations.

The federal takeover of student loans has resulted in the dramatic rise of overpriced degree programs that have little or no employment opportunity outside of academia. Holders of degrees in fields such as Women & Gender Studies, African-American Studies, Art History, Psychology, Sociology, really almost everything in the social sciences and humanities, invariably find themselves at a loss when seeking employment.

Those that don’t end up as baristas, perpetuating the cycle by teaching the next generation, or pushing their agenda in a HR department, wind up in the most destructive and expensive welfare program ever conceived, government bureaucracy. There they climb the ranks, supported by a flood of like minded ideological zealots, slowly corrupting organizations ostensibly formed to serve the public.

The DoE’s OCR with its Dear Colleague letters and manipulation of Title IX is a prime example.

Is this going to be another “it is an outrageous violation of free speech that controversial people should be subject to the same rules as everyone else” thing? If the rules at Emory are that “you have to register to chalk and you have to chalk only on the sidewalks or you get fined,” then those rules also apply to Trump 2016 guy.

If you think the fact that Emory makes you register to chalk is a violation of free speech in general, go ahead but maybe you should have brought it up earlier. If you think it’s fine normally but it’s a violation of free speech in this specific case because conservatives should have more freedom of speech than the rest of the students, well, uh.

It is a surprise to me, but even Snopes has gotten into this one.

The main things that I wanted to say about the victimhood culture paper are already in Jesse Singal’s “Have Microaggression Complaints Really Launched a Whole New Sort of ‘Victimhood Culture’?”, particularly the bit about anonymity, and so I think Haidt has almost certainly already read it. But I thought I would mention it anyway if anyone else is interested.

“you have to register to chalk and you have to chalk only on the sidewalks or you get fined”

Give me a break, nobody actually thinks the substance of this event has to do with the regulation of chalkings at Emory. Nor does this explain the sense of “trauma” and “fear” that is both the substance of the student complaints and the substance of this article. Meaningless red herring.

Also that Snopes “debunking” of the Emory incident is biased nonsense that specifically ignores quotes to further a specific take on the situation. The author of the Snopes piece was confronted directly by the Daily Beast editor and by FIRE about this.

Snopes now only disputes the “emergency counseling” claim. They rushed in with a much broader “debunking,” but had to pull back after many readers pointed to interview quotes about fear and fragility. And the Snopes author’s doubts were based in part on this logic: “It sounds made up to me. Unless college students have really gotten that sensitive.” That is a direct quote.

The article is still the same as it was when I looked at it; the judgment is still “mostly false,” and “Emory students complained that their “safe spaces” had been violated” and “students were afraid of or traumatized by the chalk markings” is still part of the false section. I looked for another article or a correction, but a casual search doesn’t turn it up. Is there another article that I can’t find?

> And the Snopes author’s doubts were based in part on this logic: “It sounds made up to me. Unless college students have really gotten that sensitive.” That is a direct quote.

Not of the author, it isn’t. That text comes from the examples section. In other words, someone sent Snopes an e-mail with that text in it. It is not part of the author’s logic.

I agree that this is not all that explicit and that a naive reader might reasonably interpret it as the author’s opinion, but it isn’t.

See, for example, “Facebook’s Hidden Inbox” or “JebBush.com Redirects to Donald Trump’s Site” by the same author for the same kind of mixture of tweets or screenshots and email content. Different emails are usually separated in Snopes’s formatting, so I would guess that the example was a single email with tweets in it.

I apologize for the late response, since it will probably be missed.

Anonymous
on April 10, 2016 at 10:48 am

“Give me a break, nobody actually thinks the substance of this event has to do with the regulation of chalkings at Emory.”

I’m not trying to win a popularity contest, here. I know that “nobody actually thinks” this. But it is true.

“Nor does this explain the sense of “trauma” and “fear” that is both the substance of the student complaints and the substance of this article.”

The only thing that matters to me here is academic freedom. In other words, I want to know whether they were searching for the chalkers for political reasons because they were conservative, or for the normal reason that they didn’t follow (or probably know) the chalking regulations.

Compare it to this 2014 incident for perspective. Quoting Reason:

“[Coastal Carolina University] said it will not be pursing criminal charges, but Cohen and her chalk co-conspirators have been charged with violations of the university’s conduct code, including vandalism and ‘unauthorized usage/entry.’ A police incident report alleges $1,000 in damages from the chalk—the same sort regularly used by Greek organizations and student groups on the same campus sidewalks.

But ‘the individuals did not get prior approval from the Office of Student Life, as is required by university polices,’ explained the university in a statement. Approval requires being a member of a registered student organization and making the request at least a week in advance.”

(Nine days after they were made, on the night of Dec 11, the conduct code charges were all dropped. “Coastal Carolina students involved in chalk incident cleared of conduct charges,” The State.)

/This/ case has some good political fireworks－three of the students were arrested and handcuffed on the spot, Cohen was tracked down from surveillance footage, and they were charged with various violations of the school conduct code. Compare this to the current incident, where the hideous repression is that they were looking at surveillance footage and thinking about conduct or trespassing charges, and honestly stand up and tell me that the Trump group is being treated unusually harshly or that this would not happen to liberals. Or tell me that you had heard about the 2014 case at all, or would have cared about it if you had.

“The author of the Snopes piece was confronted directly by the Daily Beast editor and by FIRE about this.”

I think most conservatives would be fine with a caught offender receiving the usual consequences for unauthorised chalking, such as cleaning it up, paying a small fine, whatever. That’s pretty clearly not what’s in play here. To suggest otherwise is not quite the straight bat, Chauncey.

This can only be encouraged by moral relativism. Christian Smith noted how students are not able to discuss moral grievances because they have no understanding of transcendent (or at least external) right and wrong and thus no language for addressing it. And yet they still think at times that people have done things to them that they don’t like, that they perceive as harmful. Such acts must, therefore, be simply personal attacks. The initial act isn’t morally wrong in itself, but that it’s done against me is; he has victimized me (the one remaining moral wrong?). When (objective) right and wrong are gone, all that is left to address a problem is power. If I don’t feel capable of handling the problem myself (and indeed I’m told I shouldn’t do so), I take it to the people in power.

Going out on a limb here…any connection between the culture of victimhood and large numbers of children (often children from one-child only families) now being raised in third-party care (i.e. day care), away from the rough-and-tumble of family life and sibling conflict?

For the long form you can see my reply below, but I suspect it has to do more with the increased number of females at university, where they are now the majority. Even in cultures of honor, females were expected to be hypersensitive to insults but were not expected to defend themselves – rather, they were expected to go get a guardian to do it for them – exactly as these students are doing.

Unless you’re growing up in a home with sixteen siblings, daycare is more rough and tumble than family life, and learning to get along with others necessary. I’d say these are sheltered and pampered kids with helicopter parents.. not allowed to fail or feel any adversity. Knowing Mom and Dad have to go to work and they aren’t the center of the Universe and being one of many kids who all have to get along doesn’t create the culture we see here. (Not saying stay at home parents do either, but rather the martyr type parents.)

I am a clinical psychologist and I think there is indeed a connection between victimhood and the now very common fatherlessness. Diana Ross sang about it in her song,”Love Child,” a child who was “afraid, ashamed, misunderstood.” All of these emotions can turn to anger. These children were the victims and I fear that normalizing out-of-wedlock births perpetuates more children being “victimized” and growing up lost, confused or angry. Generally speaking, children are more likely to flourish if they have a mother and a father who are married.

Actually, if you control for stability – single mother families are just fine. Encouraging young girls to marry whomever knocked them up is not a recipe for a stable environ, it’s a recipe for disaster. Divorce can be very destabilizing as well as bringing a parade of dates into the young ones lives afterwards. Yet remaining in a marriage that is full of conflict is even worse…

Two parent homes are great, if they are stable. One parent homes are also dandy, if they are stable. The problem with the studies that simply compare the number of parents is that they haven’t controlled for the disruption and parental loss and conflict that often resulted in a one parent household. That’s just crappy science and should be treated as such.